d the nature of the connection.

Poor Spinks, who had made the suggestion with an almost suicidally
honourable intention, was to his immense astonishment merely sworn at
for his interference. And when Flossie brought Keith his tea that
evening she found him in a most ungentlemanly humour.

She waited demurely for a pause in the storm that raged round Spinks
and his confounded wine-merchant. She cast a significant glance at the
table strewn at that moment with the rough draft of Rickman's tragedy.
(Flossie couldn't understand why he could never write a thing out
clearly from the first, nor why she shouldn't write it for him at his
dictation.)

"It's all very well, Keith," said she, "but if _you_ can't do more,
_I_ must."

Before she left the room it was understood between them that Flossie
would renounce her wine-merchant, and that they would be married, if
possible, some time in the autumn. He felt curiously shaken by that
interview.

He spent the evening reading over what he had written, vainly trying
to recall his inspiration, to kindle himself anew at his own flame.
Last night he had had more inspiration than he could do with; his
ideas had come upon him with a rush, in a singing torrent of light.
His mind had been then almost intolerably luminous; now, there was
twilight on its high parts and darkness over the face of its deep. His
ideas, arrested in mid-air, had been flung down into the deep; and
from the farther shore he caught, as it were, the flutter of a gown
and the light laughter of a fugitive Muse.

CHAPTER L

One day, four years after the publication of _Saturnalia_, Rickman
received a letter in an unknown hand; a woman's hand, but with a
familiar vivid signature, the signature that is to be seen beneath the
portraits of Walter Fielding, the greatest among contemporary poets,
the living god of Rickman's idolatry.

"Dear Sir," he wrote (or rather, some woman had written for him),
"I came across your Poems the other day; by chance, I must
confess, and not by choice. I have something to say to you about
them, and I would therefore be glad if you could call on me here,
to-morrow. I say, call on me; for I am an old man, and you, if I
am not mistaken, are a young one; and I say to-morrow, because
the day after to-morrow I may not have that desire to see you
which I feel to-day.

"Faithfully yours,

"Walter Fielding.

"PS.--You had bett